By the numbers

August 10, 2007

The bottled water market has been growing steadily for the past decade, while the recycling rate of PET plastic bottles, the most common containers for bottled water, has been on a steady decline. Bottled water is by no means the only product to use plastic containers, but it has drawn fire from environmental activists because water is readily available at the kitchen sink.

270 million

Gallons of bottled water consumed in Illinois last year, up 5.5 percent from 2005, making Illinois the seventh-biggest bottled water consumer in the U.S.

3.3%

Illinois' share of bottled water consumption in the U.S.

8.2 billion

Gallons of bottled water consumed in the U.S. in 2006, a 9.5 percent increase over the year before.

$10.9 billion

Bottled water sales in the U.S. in 2006, up almost 10 percent from the year before and triple that of a decade ago.

27.6

Gallons of bottled water each person in the U.S. consumed in 2006, up 8.4 percent from the previous year.